On a warm Sunday afternoon in 1907, Henry James found himself preparing to receive guests. In those days, he lived at Lamb House in Rye, Sussex. It was a peaceful time for the Master. He took long walks, read Queen Victoria’s recently published letters (“She’s more of a man than I expected” was his odd verdict), and scribbled hundreds of his own to his publisher, his brother William, Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, Mrs. William Dean Howells, and H. G. Wells, whom he admired for his “amazingly active and agile intellectual personality—I may even say your sublime and heroic cheek!” He fussed over his garden, and was proud when his flowers—roses and carnations—carried off all the prizes at a local fair. When his dog Max died, he buried him with his own hands and swore off pets forever, until one day when he happened upon a chameleon which “blushed and flushed black and brown and blanched to pinkish gray ten times a minute” and decided to keep it. On another occasion he killed a cat for making too much noise, but he later felt sick about it. Otherwise, he was fond of guests. The cars would roll up and someone—anyone—might be announced for tea. Once E. M. Forster had stopped by. “Your name’s Moore,” James had calmly announced. From Forster we have a vivid portrait of the author of The Golden Bowl: “Head rather fat, but fine, and effectively bald. . . . He was very anxious one should eat and drink. First great man I’ve ever seen.”
On the August day with which we are concerned, however, the car brought a young woman, who that very evening dashed off an account of their conversation in a letter to a friend:
We went and had tea with Henry James to-day . . . James fixed me with his staring blank eye—it is like a child’s marble—and said “My dear Virginia, they tell me—they tell me—they tell me—that you—as indeed being your father’s daughter, nay your grandfather’s grandchild, the descendant I may say of a century, of a century, of quill pen and ink, ink, inkpots, yes, yes, yes, they tell me, a h m m m, that you, that you, that you write in short.” This went on in the public street, while we all waited, as farmers wait for the hen to lay an egg, —do they? nervous, polite, and now on this foot, now on that. I felt like a condemned person, who sees the knife drop and stick and drop again.
If there is a funnier pastiche of James’s late style, I am not aware of it. The letter captures it perfectly—the footling politeness disguised as “fine writing,” the pointless pseudo-clarification of endless appositives, the endlessly protracted non-focusing of images, the sheer fussiness. Yet there is also something affectionate about it. “Never,” the author told her correspondent, “did any woman hate ‘writing’ as much as I do. But when I am old and famous I shall discourse like Henry James.”
Virginia Stephen (as she was called until her marriage to Leonard Woolf in 1912) was then twenty-five years old. The Master’s Voice had not borne false witness. She did indeed “write,” if that is the mot juste, not only letters but essays, articles, and reviews—she was already a regular on the T.L.S.—and what she called “literary exercises”—sketches, descriptions, fragments, wheezes, pastiches. There is, alas, no account of their August teatime chat from the hand of the Master, but we have the next best thing. Leon Edel, in the sixth volume of his biography of James (and in volume four of the letters), records James’s attendance a few months earlier at the wedding of Virginia’s sister, Vanessa, to “the quite dreadful-looking little stoop-shouldered, long-haired, third-rate” Clive Bell. After an interminable description of the groom and the wedding present he had given the grateful couple (“an old silver box”), James pauses to describe the bride’s sister: “Virginia,” he said, had “grown quite elegantly and charmingly and almost ‘smartly’ handsome.” He was fond of her, and of all the children of his late friend Sir Leslie Stephen: “I liked being with them, but it was all strange and terrible (with the hungry futurity of youth); and all I could mainly see was the ghosts.”
Hungry or not, in 1907 the smartly handsome grandfather’s grandchild was indeed looking to her future, as the author of Orlando. Her friendship with Violet Dickinson (to whom she had addressed the account of her tea with James) had inspired her to write a series of mock-biographical sketches. These stories were totally unknown to most readers until 1979, when they were transcribed for the scholarly journal Twentieth Century Fiction. Later they would appear again in the appendix to the sixth volume of the definitive edition of Woolf’s essays. The recent discovery of a new, somewhat later typescript—in violet ink—has led Princeton University Press to issue them as a standalone volume, a format that is likely to attract a much wider audience.
It is very difficult to describe The Life of Violet. (The title is not Woolf’s but the present editor’s.) What you make of it will probably depend in part on how much you value Orlando, of which it is the germ. Unlike in Woolf’s mature fiction, where we find a heightening and intensification of the realist project—a silent retreat from “color” in description, an emphasis on dialogue, and the use of juxtaposition to convey epistemic disjuncture—here the conventions of realism are not so much subverted as winked at while “purple” patches are cultivated alongside absurdities and grotesqueries, like the “frozen roses” and the “old bumboat woman” in Orlando. Both works belong to a curious unnamed genre, a rich but not overly wide vein which was opened around the turn of the last century and petered out by the early 1980s. These are what I think of as “skeptical romances,” books like David Garnett’s Lady into Fox, T. H. White’s Once and Future King, or, at the genre’s tail end, John Crowley’s Little, Big or Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry. Other representative authors include Sylvia Townsend Warner, the unfairly maligned Mary Worth, and perhaps Angela Carter. It originally owed something to the bogus nonfiction of the day, books such as The Golden Bough, From Ritual to Romance, and of course Margaret Murray, except that its tone was Bloomsbury. You find something of it in Forster’s Pharos and Pharillon, which contains a hagiography of Saint Athanasius composed almost like a chapter from the Lilac Fairy Book, and even in Housman, with his half-pagan world of races and gallows and doomed love set against the Keblesque backdrop of the English countryside and the unchanging liturgical year. Probably its ultimate forerunner is Hardy. The supernatural does not figure in all of these books, though it tends to be at least vaguely suggested. The outlook is pastoral, but the conception of rural life is not nostalgic in any crude sense; it is wistful, sometimes melancholic but also half-sardonic about its subject matter. Its implicit attitude toward life is mystical, but it is also humorous. (This is why D. H. Lawrence is not part of the canon.) Its tone is what Queenie Leavis objected to when she complained that Lytton Strachey was simultaneously too whimsical and too cynical.
The first sketch in The Life of Violet, “Friendships Gallery,” is the most straightforwardly biographical, if you can imagine a biography of Gargantua’s wife written by the Jane Austen of Love and Friendship. “Miss Violet Dickinson,” we are told, “grew to be as tall as the tallest hollyhock in the garden before she was eight, but after all our concern is with her spiritual progress.” Not much takes place in the span of ten-odd pages; Violet attends a dance, takes lessons with a German governess, reads Wordsworth, befriends aged dowagers, and saves the lives of several miscellaneous companions—a lady by “feeding her with steamed breadcrumbs for twelve hours incessantly,” a cook who “fell through the floor, thereby revealing the presence of an unsuspected cesspool,” a butcher whose
horse falling down the area on the same afternoon, made it necessary for her to take the man to the London hospital. He recovered, and called his first child Violus (it was a boy) after her; while Lady . . . . . . . . . . put up a window in the parish church, in which the good Samaritan helps a Leper on to his Ass, while the beast crops Violets. The horse, unfortunately, died.
The sketch ends abruptly with a series of questions about Violet’s habits and personality, to which the only answer given is “she had an Irish grandmother.”
The second section, entitled “The Magic Garden,” is, if anything, less focused. But its haziness is a kind of vision. It begins with a description of “gigantic women, lying like Greek marbles in easy chairs,” eating strawberries and cream, petting lapdogs, warbling to themselves. When they begin to move, we are told that their huge forms “shook cherry blossoms from a benignant tree upon the face of a child, who crowed thereupon and clapped his hands, as at some familiar rain of crimson butterflies.” At first the effect is like one of Oscar Wilde’s Symbolist fairy tales but with all the solid little images crashing in on each other—the flowers dislodged by the giantess’s stamping from the personified tree fall until they light upon the countenance of a child, a strange wonder-child for whom they became red rain; she is happy but also obviously accustomed to such effects, and would perhaps have been surprised to find herself greeted by nonlepidopterous precipitation of any color. In the next sentence we read:
And there were other ladies like flowers strayed from the beds, anemones and strange fritillaries freaked with jet, and certain straight tulips, tawny as sunset clasped by stiff green spikes—all kinds of flowers indeed, whose voices chimed like petals floating and kissing in the air, or creaked, as fresh tulip leaves creak when rubbed together, so that you long to crush the juice out of them.
The impression is overwhelming: a traumatic brain injury, a blocked retinal artery, apophenia. Here she is telling us—flatly declaring—that the women are “like flowers,” only to decide that they are flowers, these ones, and these ones which remind her of Milton’s pansies in Lycidas “freak’d with jet”; and then there are these ones over here, which are tulips, but some kind of spectral pre-crepuscular tulips whose racemes are otherwise ordinary—in any case, all of these specimens, which are or may be women after all, are singing, but the chanting of these women-flowers or flower-women is itself like something aural-botanical, the impossible music of flowers who have once again become flying women pressing their lips together; or else they are homemade tulip cordial. But what looks initially like a random assemblage of color words and tough short verbs—kaleidoscope vision, synesthesia, A.S.M.R., “yellow noise” territory—is actually a Donne-like conceit, held up, vivisected, briefly considered, and displayed from every possible angle. The result is a kind of Droste effect, in which the same basic metaphorical texture—women, flowers, sound—is shown to us over and over again in a seemingly infinite number of variations, like the cover of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma: flower-like women; flowers and sunset-like flowers; singing flowers; flower-like songs; flying flowers and flower-kisses; women touching flowers. There is logic here, although the progression of images is not algorithmic, much less linear, but the mass of irregularity still seems cultivated, like a horde of slightly askew ascots. “This,” Woolf’s narrator says, “is a picture of noble English ladies at tea, as true as I can make it”; such women “think, eat and breathe—live in short—besides existing or whatever the polite word for it is, within the pages of Burke.” It is, surely, many other things as well.
After this the narrator confesses that she cannot elaborate on her previous description because to do so “would require a surgical knowledge of anatomy, neither polite nor possible.” This mock-prudish vein gives way to a confession from the narrator, who tells us that she lives “in a garret with one dirty charwoman who brings me Lloyds Weekly and a bunch of kippered herrings tied by the tails like candles on Friday nights.” There is some light satire of medical fads and Unionist politics and poor old G. M. Trevelyan, interspersed with descriptions of “the Cornish sea . . . with rocks and emerald water and blue sky” before Violet finally re-emerges as “one of the flowers in the magic garden . . . a tall rod of a plant with queer little tassels always quivering and austere silver leaves which prick you if you don’t know the way of them.”
The third and final sketch, “A Story to Make You Sleep,” is weirder. How weird? It begins in the final paragraph of the second one, where the narrator promises us a bedtime story. To say that it is inspired by Woolf’s reading of books like Lord Redesdale’s Tales of Old Japan would be severely underselling it. It is more like watching Sailor Moon with subtitles by Arthur Waley or a Jane Campion–directed reboot of Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster. A still-gigantic Violet has been transported—on the back of a whale, how else—from England to “Tokio,” where she is recognized as a princess “scarcely of mortal birth.” At first we are not sure whether to be afraid of her. (Acolytes beware: We are told that in her previous incarnation the goddess “shot with pointed arrows all who made mistakes of sound or of grammar so that they never dared to come again.”) Anyway, she has a co-princess too, there is something about a giant crow, and in response to a question from the local priest about “what form of worship is pleasant,” the two deities simply request that mothers bring their babies over when it’s bath time. A golden age dawns. “All the most delightful things you can think of, which never happen now, happened every day”: candy for breakfast, almond snow, money trees, etc. But one day the people are troubled by the sight of a large wave, “only it was no wave, but a monster”:
Now they had just made up their minds to be devoured, when the two Princesses came down to the sea shore and bewitched the monster by making passages with certain magic wands called “Umbrellas.” He turned livid, and his skin peeled off him in dry scales, and his eyes grew white like those of a stranded cod fish; a great gash opened in his back, from which a swarm of ant-like spirits came pouring, obedient to the summons of their mistresses. They gave one look at the town and at the hill, laughed and waved their arms once more; at that moment the sun burst forth like a rushing yellow globe, and the Princesses spread their tails and leapt onto the monsters [sic] back.
By this point, the narrator says, we have all probably “been asleep these two hours.” I haven’t slept since.
✥ ✥ ✥
It is not difficult to see why Woolf failed to publish these pieces in her lifetime, and why Leonard kept them from posthumous collections, even as he made a point of bringing out her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog. They are, for one thing, a series of in-jokes, scarcely legible to strangers, especially at the remove of several decades. They are also very slight (the actual text runs only thirty-six pages in the Princeton edition).
Still, I cannot help but think that they deserve more readers. Apart from Woolf’s fans and historians of modernism, the stories here should hold a certain amount of interest for actual biographers. At a time when formal experiment is not only encouraged but increasingly demanded in life writing, Woolf’s unconventional narrative structure—a wayward and ultimately inconclusive account of youth and early adulthood punctuated by hallucinatory interludes of social history—offers an interesting model, especially in situations where similar decisions are already dictated by a chronologically uneven distribution of primary sources. Even the Japan section suggests the sometimes unguessed value of throwing a subject into a radically different cultural context; at a more fundamental level, it also shows up the unavoidable pretense inherent in all biography: the mythologization of subjects, however ordinary their beginnings. After all the careful show of objectivity and the avoidance of anachronisms, we end up inevitably telling what are ultimately ludicrous stories about taming beasts from the sea.
Here it is probably worth saying something briefly about the edition itself. As I have already mentioned, these three stories have long been known to scholars and to readers of The Essays of Virginia Woolf. The new typescript is interesting, but it does not really merit being hailed as “a major literary discovery,” much less a new book by Virginia Woolf. In her textual notes Urmila Seshagiri details some three hundred “revisions,” virtually all of them involving either capitalization or punctuation (about which Woolf could be slapdash, especially when writing quickly). Thus, “God fathers” becomes “god-fathers”; a few semicolons become commas and vice versa, and “Fraülein” loses an umlaut which had been misplaced to begin with. There is nothing to indicate “revision” in the sense of a widening (or narrowing) of vision, a fundamental change in the conception of the work itself, or even a desire to make the individual stories more cohesive. What Woolf in fact did was a spot of copy editing.
A few stray glances at the notes left me wondering who the target audience for this book is. Is there a person who will seek it out without knowing the definitions of “manor house,” “font,” “squire,” “peer,” “Renaissance,” “shillings,” and “Mandarin,” or will benefit from being told that today some people consider the word “heathen” to be “derogatory”? If this hypothetical selectively ignorant aficionado of Woolf juvenilia—an escaped North Korean convict, perhaps, who taught himself English with a purloined copy of The Waves—comes to these pages ignorant of Elizabeth I, Wordsworth, Keats, Gladstone, Darwin, and the Good Samaritan, how useful will potted two-sentence biographies be, especially when they are separated from the main text by sixty or so pages? Despite her claim to have silently corrected “indisputable spelling errors,” Seshagiri leaves “bans” where Woolf obviously meant “banns,” a possible pitfall for the kind of ingénue who otherwise depends on the editor for the occult knowledge that Loch Ness is a “lake in the Scottish Highlands.”
But these are quibbles. Here we have an attractive volume. It has violet endpapers, it costs twenty dollars, and it contains the phrase “Duchesses are as true as nightingales.”
